Abstract

Focusing on the play’s genealogy and various allusions to the black legend, this article recovers the long-neglected Spanish dimension of Gothic identity in Titus Andronicus and reconsiders the racial discourse of the play in the light of this information. Within an analogical setup associating Goths with Spaniards and Romans with Englishmen, the play attempts intellectual emancipation: it attempts to think through the topical question of the black African presence in 1590s England on English terms — outside of the Iberian conceptual frameworks with which black Africans had long been associated.

Author Biography

Noémie Ndiaye, Columbia University

Noémie Ndiaye (nn2274@columbia.edu) is a doctoral candidate in theatre in the department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, where she is a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellow. Her dissertation, 'Marking Blackness: Embodied Techniques of Racialization in Seventeenth-Century European Theatre',dissects the various techniques of cross-racial performance used to represent and racialize Africans in early modern England, France, and Spain.She has a forthcoming article in Renaissance Drama called 'Everyone Breeds in his Own Image: Staging the Aethiopica across the Channel'.

References

Primary Sources

Ashley, Robert. A comparison of the English and Spanish nation: composed by a French gentleman against those of the League in Fraunce, which went about to perswade the king to breake his alliance with England, and to confirme it with Spaine. By occasion whereof, the nature of both nations is liuely decyphered. Faithfully translated, out of French, by R.A., Gentil-homme francois, fl. 1588. London: Printed by Iohn Wolfe, 1589.

Davenant, William, The History of Sir Francis Drake, exprest by Instrumentall and Vocall Musick, and by Art of Perspective in Scene, etc. London: Printed for Henry Herringman, 1659.

Johnson, Samuel. Titus Andronicus. The Yale Digital Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson. New Haven: Yale University Press. Web.

Las Casas, Bartolomé de. The Spanish Colonie, or Briefe chronicle of the acts and gestes of the Spaniardes in the West Indies, called the newe world, for the space of xl. yeeres: written in the Castilian tongue by the reuerend Bishop Bartholomew de las Cases or Casaus, a friar of the order of S. Dominicke. And nowe first translated into English, by M.M.S. Imprinted at London: [By Thomas Dawson] for William Brome, 1583.

Munday, Anthony. The Coppie of the Anti-Spaniard made at Paris by a French Man, a Catholique. Wherein is directly proued how the Spanish King is the onely cause of all the troubles in France. Translated out of French into English. London: Printed by Iohn Wolfe, 1590.

Nichols, Philip, Sir Francis Drake Revived, Calling upon this Dull or Effeminate Age to folowe his noble steps for gold and silver. London: Printed by E. A. for Nicholas Bourne, 1626.

Barker, Francis, ‘Treasures of Culture: Titus Andronicus and Death by Hanging’, The Production of English Renaissance Culture, ed. David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994. 226-261.

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